Mobilier tropical et comportement corporel dans l'Asie coloniale

The European populations of British and Dutch colonies in Asia were disproportionately male. For many of these men, the colonies were a place of sojourn and a refuge from the norms of metropolitan society. This encouraged among them an open form of domestic life with loose standards of decorum.[i] As works of literature like Orwell’s Burmese Days suggest, it was not unusual for men to spend days drunk. Alcohol was particularly central to life in the military cantonments, where large quantities were included in soldiers’ rations. At the same time, the tropical climate licensed among colonists continually anxious about its effect on their health a general condition of languishing, drunk or sober.[ii]

In colonial bungalows where women were present, the design of the house made servants less spatially segregated from their mistresses and masters than they would have been in the middle-class houses of metropolitan England. British colonists coped with their constant presence in part by ignoring them. This may be what is conveyed by a portrait photograph for which a couple posed with their servants in Arkonam in 1904 (figure 2; reproduced in Collingham, Imperial Bodies). The man and woman sit in two rattan chairs on a verandah, surrounded by ten men standing and sitting on the floor. Master and mistress have conspicuously chosen to present themselves in profile, so that each looks off in the distance, away from the camera and past one another and the servants, as if each were alone. The portrait, which its owners captioned “To shew the servants,” suggests their pride in retaining such a large staff and in their aristocratic aloofness from it.[iii] In another telling image from British India, this one an illustration from a book of comic verse about Indian life (figure 3), we see a man leaning back and blowing cigarette smoke toward the ceiling as he sits on the verandah of his bungalow (note that both verandah and bungalow are Anglo-Indian terms), one leg up on the arm of the chair. His manservant prepares him a drink. Placing his body semi-supine and raising his foot off the floor, he expresses his privilege and unconcern for the servant’s presence. The illustration accompanied a limerick about the pleasures of solitude and alcohol.[iv]

[i] On the causes and consequences of the gender imbalance in colonial populations, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (University of California Press, 2002), 46-55.

[ii] David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (University of California Press, 1993), 80-83.

[iii] Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 107-8. I do not mean to suggest that social divisions were as absolute as they appear in this carefully staged photograph. Stoler discusses the extensive prescriptive literature that sought to establish and protect European distinctiveness in colonial environments where racial and social identities were often less clear.

[iv] George Francklin Atkinson, Curry and Rice on Forty Plates, or the Ingredients of Social Life at “Our Station” in India (London: Day and Son, 1854). This illustration is also reproduced in Anthony King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (2nd edition; Oxford University Press, 1995).

[4] George Francklin Atkinson, Curry and Rice on Forty Plates, or the Ingredients of Social Life at “Our Station” in India, Londres, Day and Son, 1854. Cette illustration est également reproduite dans Anthony King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2e édition, 1995.